Anaplan vs. CallidusCloud LeadRocket (discontinued)

Anaplan is best suited for strategic planning initiatives in industries like CPG, Manufacturing, FS, Pharma. It can handle multiple use cases for each function in the company like Supply chain, Finance, Sales and more. It is one of the best tools I have seen in scenario modelling. It is not suitable for very detailed level planning, essentially execution level eg. Production scheduling.

We have really enjoyed the personal level of customer service with CallidusCloud and the quick turn around on any concerns and issues. CallidusCloud works well as an integrated instance with Salesforce and also as a stand alone instance that can send to csv files. We have been able to build campaigns, track success of said campaigns and manage automation. The level of integration has been key to our success and to the ability to create professional, personalized templates that are true to our brand but allow us to innovate. We also are pleased with the way that we can add blocks of emails on during our busy times so that service is not interrupted.

Incentivized

• Anaplan can scale as your business grows, for example adding new regions into to your geographical hierarchy.
• Anaplan is flexible and can do anything you want it to, there are no tables pre-configured that you need to fix your business process into.
• Reading formulas in Anaplan is straight forward with a quick learning curve.

• Reporting - we can send out emails all day, but if we don't have something to report to the client after-the-fact it voids the entire process. Genius provided a visually stimulating reporting tool.
• Tracking - Genius was great at tracking opens, clicks, bounces, hard bounces, etc. This helped us clean up our system as we sent campaigns out.
• CRM Integration - Genius was great about tracking each contact (in Salesforce) and their activity via emails.

• Ability to decide if to apply the formula or a manual input on front end for each line item
• Real Time Data Transfer across models. Currently Data is transferred using Processes across different models. Having a functionality to access data from any model in real time would be great

• One area of LeadFormix that could be improved is the way it schedules out an email to multiple lists. It can get problematic when an email scheduled to ten lists takes ten hours (one list per hour) to go out. It also isn't efficient to make us schedule individual emails instead of this process. I would like to be able to send out an email to ten lists and have it arrive in everyone's mailboxes at the time I scheduled it for.
• The email design platform could use work. I've resorted to coding my emails using html, since the WYSIWYG platform seems to add unwanted and un-needed style codes throughout the email (it's not a platform for people unfamiliar with coding).

Anaplan is a very strong multi-dimensional modeling tool that provides a calculation engine to empower a complex planning process. It is fairly easy to learn for those with experience in similar tools, or excel. It forces structure and auditability that spread sheets do not have, along with extensive security capabilities

Since the company has grown, the personal touch has dispatched and it's more difficult to get a rep. There is no longer a phone call that can be made but the responses don't take as long as others and the glitches are becoming more and more frequent.

Incentivized

Anaplan is interesting because it is at the same time easy to use and difficult to use. An end user can navigate a well-constructed app, being pointed in the right direction every time they feel a slight bit of confusion, and find everything they need in what feels like a straight line. Similarly, a model builder (developer of sorts) can have the exact same experience, but the journey is longer and more complicated. End users have great experiences with Anaplan, but sometimes model builders have a frustrating one. That is not to say model building is hard (because it truly is not), but things change, and when things change in complex systems, the effort required simply to investigate where a model builder needs to make an adjustment may frustrate them but also frustrate their non-technical bosses. However, the reality is that with complicated businesses, complicated business problems, come complicated solutions. It is actually a testament to Anaplan's capabilities that it has taken on the biggest problems at the biggest companies. It may be daunting to adjust it in those environments, but at least you know it did meet the needs there, which is more than most tools can say.

Very easy to use and designed well.

There are very few outages. Maintenance is scheduled on two or three Saturdays per month, so as not to affect businesses. When there is an outage, users are kept informed of progress to restore the platform and typically this takes no more than an hour. Anaplan customer support is very responsive if we ever have questions about platform issues

Everything is calculated in memory in the cloud. It's nearly instantaneous updates when you make changes. The only time things get a little slow is when you have a massive model with very intricate calculations...but "slow" for Anaplan is not what I would call "slow" for something like Hyperion. We used to have Hyperion calcs that ran for 60 mins before you could use data. The equivalent would be 60 seconds in Anaplan.

Incentivized

Support quality has dropped since Thoma Bravo has taken over. I think some serious re-focus needs to happen here -- part of the beauty of being in the Anaplan community was how involved you felt in it before. Before I didn't dread sending a support ticket, now I am starting to.

It has declined since we started with this company and it could be better.

Incentivized

In my opinion, in-person training is always the best if you have the option to do so. This allows real-time interactions with the instructions, whereas the online training I took required me to write-down questions, email them, and wait for responses. This slows down the process, as you can imagine. That said, in-person training is an extra cost and it likely isn't needed for everyone. I would suggest selecting a small number of people to take in-person training and then having them act as mentors to the rest of your team. That way, as the rest of the team takes the online training, they have a resource to help them in real time.

Anaplan training materials are clear, simple, easy to understand and to follow. Visuals are excellent. The vendor is good at updating training materials in a timely manner and encouraging users and administrators to keep coming back to Academy site for refresher courses or new feature courses. I really like their interactive diagrams

The platform allows a flexible implementation mechanic to be put in place, since the possibilities and functionalities are vast and there are very few things the tool cannot do well. The solutions for the financial planning and the integrated business planning we put in place were easily adopted by the end users and their day-to-day work was made easier.

Anaplan and these other tools are very similar. I cannot say that I selected Anaplan over them as I have worked with and been involved with setting up a number of tools for clients. They all have their advantages and Anaplan is a very strong tool in the cloud planning space

We selected CallidusCloud (Genius) based on the level of service for the price. It was more cost effective then Silver Pop which was another tool recommended to us. On the other hand, mail chimp did not provide the level of integration needed with our CRM - Salesforce. We need to be able to connect the response to an email campaign to the individual contact (student) record and determine the success of the campaign.

Incentivized

We have managed to leverage Anaplan for financial planning and forecasting across the business. It is now used by almost every department, with more than 50 users (but I know of companies that have hundreds of users) and still the platform is quick and reliable. It is easy to make changes to divisions and departments or add users and apply different user settings - the core part of the model is not affected and end users can continue their work without any disruption

• Anaplan's implementation led to a significant reduction in planning cycle errors and bugs, streamlining processes and improving overall accuracy in data inputs
• Standardizing the planning process and enabling cross-functional collaboration through Anaplan enhanced our ability to adapt swiftly to changing business needs, resulting in improved agility in decision-making
• The platform's capabilities, especially in Demand Planning and Supply Chain, positively impacted our ROI by optimizing resource allocation and solving complex business problems efficiently across multiple functions

• We have had problems with our emails landing up in spam which was hampering out marketing efforts.
• Too many features that add very little value to business
• You spend too much of time on the tool because the UI is very confusing

Incentivized